Sex, Drugs, Ratt & Roll: My Life in Rock

by Stephen Pearcy

  “So this is what a backstage looks like!” she said. “I’ve always wondered.”

  “Mom, what do you think, you like it?”

  “I’m having the best time!” she laughed.

  I folded my piece of foil in half, flattened it slowly with my hand, then folded it over again, flattened it again.

  We waved good-bye to our friends and family, told them we’d see them after the show. We strutted out, nodding our heads to the beat that rocked us, the baddest motherfuckers in the building. Album coming out in the spring. The lights went down. The smoke machine kicked in. We stepped onstage.

  I placed a chunk of heroin on top of the foil and flicked my lighter, watching the blue flame intently for a moment, mesmerized.

  Halfway through our first song, I noticed a small woman come walking out onstage, right in the middle of our act. She was smiling the widest, most beautiful smile I’d ever seen. My jaw dropped, and I broke out in laughter when I realized it was . . . my own mother.

  I applied heat to the foil, making sure there were a few inches of space between the flame and the foil, and slowly the heroin began to vaporize. I pulled the flame back, being careful not to produce any smoke on the first attempt. Then I reapplied the heat, and the tar gave off vapors this time, and I sucked them through the tube of an emptied ballpoint pen, holding the smoke in my lungs for as long as possible.

  My mother shuffled toward me slowly, without hurry, a drink in her hand. When finally she reached me at center stage, she threw her arms around me and gave me the warmest hug.

  “You DID it!”

  Then she turned, saluted the audience, and walked back toward the wings. I burst out laughing.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the woman who gave me life!”

  The audience roared.

  Exhale.

  SURPRISINGLY, THROUGHOUT ALL THIS, I MANAGED to remain mostly functional. I formed a solo band and toured with them occasionally. My guitarist was Erik Ferintinos, the next-door neighbor I’d met years before, coming off the Detonator tour—and I tour with him to this day. He’d evolved into a great guitarist. I helped sponsor a Top Fuel dragster with my friend Dan Prakowski. We had two semis with the Ratt logo, crisscrossing the whole circuit, and found a sensational driver, Clay Millican, to race for us for a full season—one of the biggest deals we’ve accomplished with our company. We sponsored a Top Fuel funny car for a race with James Day. I still had that intense love for racing, and I made as many races as I could. That is the love of my life. I feel more at home at the races than anywhere else—smelling the nitro, feeling the thunder, the power, the color, the excitement.

  I was getting kind of reckless. I snuck tar with me on the plane every time we flew, hiding the smack in my clothes. The moment we’d land, I’d take a piece out and put it on the tip of my cigarette, which I called a bullet. I’d smoke it as soon as I touched down.

  “Hey, what’s that smell?” one woman asked me, looking curious.

  “A good thing,” I told her.

  I was white and skinny, the typical junkie look. When you’re smoking all the time, you just don’t have that much interest in eating. I was busy, anyway, banging out my solo records. They were beautifully imperfect, and to me, they were a welcome departure from our days when award-winning producers came in and picked through every note with a fine-toothed comb. I didn’t care what people thought of them. I deliver. I don’t waste time. I go into the studio, and it’s a go.

  And as always, there were many ups and downs with the members of Ratt. We went through several lawsuits, putting one another through hell, doing much name-calling and finger-pointing. And yet, somehow, every few years, we tried to put the differences behind us and come together around the one thing we all still loved: our music.

  Ratt put out a best-of CD in 2007; we did a European tour in 2008; and in 2009 we came together in Virginia Beach to try to record our first real album in a decade.

  The album was called Infestation. We wrote some great songs, but I had to endure some pretty tedious writing sessions with Warren.

  “Okay, great, man,” I said. “I like what you just played there. Let’s take that and run with it.”

  “Hold on, hold on,” he said. “I want to work on this some more.”

  It got harder and more complex to write with him. I used to just hear a riff coming out of Warren, and I’d go “What is that?” And there was our new hit tune. But it got to be like pulling teeth with him. He had a methodical, mathematical sense of writing, which I felt was anything but Ratt.

  “Dude, the best work we ever did was spontaneous. Fast and raw and blunt, that’s how we work best,” I said.

  “You’re the one who stepped away, Stephen,” Warren said. “So I think it’d be better if you learned to roll with the punches.”

  So we wrote some songs in the slowest, most agonizing way possible. I stewed, feeling like I could have written the whole thing myself in a month. And of course, every day, in the back of my mind, I was just waiting for our recording session to finish, so I could go back to the hotel room to get high.

  Some mornings I’d come in with tar in my pocket. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of hiding it from my bandmates. But then again, there were those days when I’d go into a long nod in the studio, and they’d have to nudge makeup mirrors underneath my nostrils to make sure I was alive. They weren’t always the nicest guys, but none of them were dumb. They knew something was going on.

  But I had that fucking demon on my shoulders, whispering to me. I mean, I was in deep. I was getting smack sent to me through the mail as much as I could. When that started to fall through, I tried to get pills sent to me. I needed some sort of opiate to level out the smack need.

  “You doing all right there, buddy?” Blotzer asked me, noticing me looking sickly in the studio.

  “Oh yeah,” I mumbled. “Getting by, Bob.”

  But when I came to a place where I could get neither smack nor pills, I began, horribly, to withdraw. I was feeling dope sick. It wasn’t good. This is what Robbin went through, I thought. So I’d have to find a bunch of cheap pills, anything to kind of get me through the day. I couldn’t wait to get that record done.

  I made it home and celebrated with a junk blowout. Just smoking all day, every day. I had my connection coming and going. He was the main person in my life. Finally one day, I exhaled a mouthful of smoke and just realized that the situation had come to a head.

  I stumbled out of my studio and came into the house, where I found Melissa.

  “I need to go to rehab,” I said, my hands trembling. “I need to go now, okay?”

  “All right . . .” she said, looking frightened.

  “You’re not getting it,” I hissed. “Drive me somewhere right fucking now, before I change my mind. Not in an hour, not in half an hour. NOW.”

  We tore down the highway, Melissa driving me in my car. It was an impulsive decision, so we literally just picked a place from the phone book, a clinic in Van Nuys. It was straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  “You’ll get your methadone starting tonight, Mr. Pearcy. . . .”

  I wasn’t supposed to get methadone, though. I wasn’t injecting—supposedly, diacetylmorphine was the thing that would help me stop smoking, without crazy withdrawals. But this clinic was caught back in the previous century. They wanted to see me sweat it out. And that’s exactly what I did.

  I kissed my wife good-bye and for an hour or so I felt good, virtuous, upstanding, sure I had made the right decision. Then the cold sweats started. It was night and I was shown to my room. I curled up in my bed, clammy white sheets tangled around me in a dank white room, some other bearded guy snoozing away happily in a bed about six feet away from me.

  I can do this, I told myself. I can kick this. I have the power to rid this shit from my body.

  My head began to thud with pain, and chills ran up and down my body. I felt panicked suddenly, like I needed to leave the room. My stomach filled with
acid and I didn’t know whether I needed to shit or jump out of my skin.

  “Let me get through this,” I prayed out loud, gathering the sheets around me weakly. Let me rid myself of this poison.

  I bit my lip, willing myself not to puke my fucking guts out and shit on myself. Everything felt cold. I wanted to take a pill so badly I could almost taste it in my mouth. Just one, I thought. Just one oxy . . .

  I gritted my teeth, begging the time to pass. I looked at my skin, hallucinating with sickness, and saw the sweat rising on parts of me that never sweated, like my forearms, even the backs of my wrists. I found myself searching my memory for distractions, for anything that had happened to me when I was younger, anything to get my mind off the present moment, this Van Nuys hell.

  When I was fourteen, Walt Rhoades took me to Indy, and on the whole trip there, I never slept in a motel room. Never slept in a bed. Each night, I crashed out underneath the trailer, lying on top of a pile of army blankets, a couple of feet over from the wheel well. Gazing up, instead of stars, I saw the soot-soaked piping of the undercarriage of the trailer, and I had never felt more happiness or excitement.

  My mouth felt thick with my own spit. I gagged on my tongue, a disgusting feeling. I wrapped my sheets around my midsection, writhing against the mattress.

  “Is there anyone fucking out there?” I called out into the hall. “Goddammit, can someone get me some new sheets? Or a blanket?”

  There was no answer. A wave of pain throbbed through my stomach, and I bolted to the bathroom.

  The moment before the races started was the most exciting moment of all: the Christmas tree counting down . . . . four amber-colored lights . . . every cell in your body electric . . . sweat circles spreading out from your armpits, teeth biting down . . . and with the last light a green, the dragsters exploded out of the gate. Seven seconds later, the parachutes pulled. . . .

  I sat naked on the toilet, my leg drumming up and down nonstop, rivulets of sweat rolling down my forehead, my stomach clenching convulsively, as I discharged the contents of my stomach through my sphincter. Humiliated and helpless, I sat there, smelling my own stench, nowhere to go.

  We took the long way back from Indy. Walt drove us through mountain ranges and the twisting highways that cut through them. On the third day, we passed through Vegas. The pit crew voted to stop at Circus Circus for lunch. We hadn’t showered for a week. We strutted through the low-end casino like a team of proud war-torn veterans, past the slot machines and the hard-eyed girls, where we ate steak and biscuits and coffee. . . .

  I stood up in the bathroom, eyeing the shower. I lacked the strength to step in there, though. I turned on the faucet of the sink and splashed cold water on my face. It made no difference. None of it did. Every molecule of my body was in pain and every mote of me wanted one thing: smack.

  “Hey,” I whispered, going back into my room. “Hey, dude.”

  My roommate continued to sleep soundly.

  “Dude,” I whispered.

  He stirred. “Huh? What do you want?”

  “Hey, listen, could you go sleep somewhere else tonight?” I said. “I’m in hell over here. I need to be by myself, man.”

  He just rolled over and fell back to sleep.

  My head was feverish. I felt like crying. I did cry. I cried for myself and the pain I was in, for the marriage I’d got myself into. I cried for my brother King, who’d died. I cried because I’d been half a dad, half a man. I cried for the group I’d once formed that had dissolved, bickering. I cried for the simple beauty of life and my refusal to accept it on its own terms.

  Robbin came to visit me right at the end, a couple of years before he died, when he needed some money. His weight was out of control, and all he wanted to do was play some music with me. “I’ve been writing,” he said. I brought him back to the studio to play, but first I had him shower. He had track marks in his feet and open sores. The only place he could shoot up was between his toes.

  We played music together. I gave him clothes and he ate at our table. He met my baby. And then he had to go.

  I cried until the pain felt good, until there were no tears left inside me and the only thing I wanted to do was vomit. I crawled to the bathroom that smelled like my own shit and felt my gorge rise, and there I was, heaving chunks into the toilet, bile, the dizziness unbearable, my heart sick with disappointment and shame and, finally, relief.

  I DIDN’T SLEEP FOR FOUR DAYS, and it got worse before it started to get better. After a few days of hell in the cuckoo’s nest, I moved from the clinic in Van Nuys to a nicer one in Pasadena, where that Dr. Drew guy was, and I continued my drying-out process there. Slowly, I kind of started to function again.

  I met therapists in Pasadena like Dr. Roberts, who took me and forced me to ask myself questions about who I was. Under all that bravado and all those addictions, I found there was a Stephen who could exist on his own terms, stand up without a buzz on, and dig into his own life.

  My mother died after a long bout with cancer two years ago. I tell myself that at least she saw me get sober and really try. She saw me go through rehab.

  Ratt is always up in the air. Infestation was released in 2010 and it garnered us the best reviews we’d had in years. We reunite onstage from time to time, and always seem on the verge of forgiving one another for our past. Yet we’ll probably always be dysfunctional, bitter. There’s a lot of water under the bridge, and now that King’s gone, it’s that much harder to envision a true reunion. More than likely, there will never be one. I’ve accepted that. For whatever reasons, some others haven’t.

  But music for me isn’t just about Ratt. The beauty of music is that it’s not in the past: It’s right now. That’s why I love my solo band so much. Ratt used to do 225 shows a year, and in a decade of touring, I don’t think we ever once went to a museum. We went to the ends of the earth—but where did it get us?

  Now when I tour, I enjoy the country. We make stops. We get out. We touch the dirt. Check in: How’s your strip bar over here? Some toothless hags dancing around? Hey, it’s a beautiful thing.

  The years have been tough on me physically. I’m walking around in an older body, with a destroyed kneecap, a heart broken a few times. I didn’t preserve my vocal cords: It was always about drinking a beer and having a smoke. I could have gone out there and shoved a towel in my mouth and done vocal exercises, but that never quite fit my vibe. I tell myself I’ve never sounded better. Hopefully others agree.

  We had a solo show last week, in Vegas. One dude in my solo band has this chick who comes to a lot of our shows to watch him, sort of a groupie type. She was there last week. She brought her husband to the show, and the husband came backstage, did a bunch of blow, and watched his wife get fucked by a rock star. And when that shit goes down, you just go, What? Why are we allowed to do this?

  It kinda got to me, for a second. Not like it disturbed me; it just kind of confused me. This kind of thing has been happening since the beginning of rock, of course. Been there, done that, thousands of times. But it was like I was seeing it with new eyes, having gone through rehab and all that. So I thought about it for a while, and it came to me: It’s because we have our gold debauchery cards. Those cards aren’t given. They’re earned. I used to have a platinum debauchery card. Had to get rid of that one. It got me into too much trouble.

  I have a motto: A hundred people, a thousand people, ten thousand people. It’s all the same to me. It’s a fucking party.

  My kid is the most important person in my life now. She’s sixteen, a true teenager. We have the best time together, taking trips down to San Diego, trucking over to the beach. I do any show, she’s always there. She’s jaded already. She knows her old man. Now I take her to concerts of her choosing and have to sit through watching the bands she’s listening to, thinking, If she only knew what was going on backstage. I think she already does. She hasn’t been blind all this time. She’s too smart for that. That’s why she’s my Jewel.

  Whe
n my solo band had a gig at the Whisky this summer, she came backstage with me, looking around curiously.

  “So this is where it all went down, Jewel. Your dad was sitting right over there with David Lee Roth. Isn’t that cool?”

  “Who’s David Roth?” she said, wrinkling her nose.

  “Some old guy,” I explained, laughing. “A singer.”

  We went out there that night, with my kid in the audience, and just had the best time. Slayed the Whisky crowd like it was 1982, screaming and yelling and fucking with the audience. We even blasted out “Round and Round.” Gave the crowd something to take home.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SPECIAL THANX:

  God for giving me this life; my mother, Joanne Ruaben (RIP), I miss u dearly; John Ruaben; my beautiful Jewel Pearcy; Melissa—NFLW; Robbin “King” Crosby (RIP), it’s never been the same again; Warren DeMartini, Juan Croucier, and Bobby Blotzer; Phillip Schwartz; Walt Rhoades; Dale Pulde; James Day; Clay Millican; Johnny “Road Ratt” Gehring; Duke Valenti; Tina; Wendy; Britta Wilson; Sam Benjamin (strange trip thru heaven and hell); Marshall Berle; Mark Leonard; Bobby Collin; Jim Kuzmich; Adam Chromy; Jeremie Ruby-Strauss; Heather Hunt; Big Bruce; Chris Hager (my brother); Big Joe Anthony; Victor Mamanna; Mike Hartigan; Bill Gazzarri; the Rainbow; Mrs. O’ (RIP); Thomas Asakawa; Wade Smith; Erik Ferintinos, my Rat Bastard partner in grime; Tim Garcia (RIP), brutha; Bob Eisenberg; Dave Thum; Dr. Rock Raskind; Steff, my twin; Debbie and Will; every road manager, crew, and tour manager thru the years; Evan Cohen; Robert Crane; Matt Thorn; Fred Coury; Donny Syracuse; Mike Andrews; Johnny Angel Scaglione; Neil Zlozower; my Rat Bastards thru the years; Troy Johnson; Frankie Wilsey; Todd Roberson; Mike Duda; Greg D’Angelo; Scott Coogan; the Gladiators. To all those friends I might have forgotten, and foes. A long, strange trip it’s been, and it’s not over yet!

  Pearcy kids, Culver City, 1962—Debbie, William, Stephanie, and me.